Bitchy Blueberries…

At the beginning of July we got a lot of rain. Like A LOT of rain. The Baker River is across the road from us and is usually a nice walking river. Meaning you can wear an old pair of shoes and shorts and have a fairly leisurely stroll through it without fighting rapids and fearing for your life. Well the rain that we got on the 1st of July brought our nice calm river up at least 5 feet. I shit you not. We witnessed entire full-grown trees being taken down by the water. Very impressive.

(The Baker River & one of the rain induced ponds in our yard)

The point is we’ve had a lot of rain this summer. Being a recent transplant I can’t say for certain that this is an abnormal amount of rain for a NH summer, but it’s a lot of rain. Which does not explain why our blueberries are being bitchy.

Remember the blueberries that I posted about? (It was only a few days ago so it shouldn’t be that difficult.) To give you an idea of what I was up against…

The first picture was before I even went over the bridge to get behind the pond. The second picture is what it looked like before I attacked it.

Here it is cleaned up. 15+ blueberries – easily identifiable from all of the other craziness growing up there. Yes, they need to be pruned and cleaned up but at least we can now get to the bushes. And we can see a bear before being mauled by it.

As beat up as the bushes are, each one had tons of non-ripe blueberries on it. We walked up last evening to check their progress and color me surprised when I found this…

Withered up little bastards! And from what I read, they’re withered up because they’re dry! WTF! With all the rain we’ve had, you’d think these guys would be swamped. Mostly we’re glad that it doesn’t seem to be mummy berry (as fun as the name is it doesn’t sound fun to deal with), and I’m also glad it rained most of the night and today. Because I really don’t want to explain this one to the bears.